How much rain does the Myrtle Beach area need to get out of this drought? Here’s what experts say
Horry County has been hit by a drought.
More than 98% of residents live in impacted areas — 41% more than last week. As rain remains scarce, temperatures are high, worsening drought conditions. To get out of the drought and back to normal conditions, here’s what Myrtle Beach needs.
“The current drought is likely as bad as back in October 2007 but not as bad as summer of 2002,” said Victoria Oliva, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Wilmington office.
The most important factor in drought recovery is, of course, rain. Horry County usually gets about 5 inches of rain in June, but last month the area received less than half that number.
While 3 and a half inches of rain would help get Horry County back to average rainfall for the summer, there’s no precise amount of precipitation that would end the drought. That’s because some types of rain are more helpful than others.
“We need a period of decent rain over the entire area, not locally hit or miss,” Oliva said. “We need some nice, widespread rain. A few inches would definitely help, but it’s got to be consistent and a little bit prolonged, not what we’ve been seeing over the last month.”
After brief, intense summer storms where an area gets a lot of rain in a short amount of time, the ground can’t absorb as much water. Instead of putting moisture back into the soil, these storms create runoff.
“It’s hard to say just this raw amount of rainfall would lead to X amount of drought improvement, because there’s more than just incoming rainfall that we’re looking at when we’re doing the drought analysis,” said National Drought Mitigation Center climatologist Curtis Riganti.
Hotter weather also worsens drought conditions by increasing evaporation, which dries out soil and lowers surface water. Drier soil hurts livestock, wildlife and crops and the decreased moisture in plants leaves areas more susceptible to wildfires.
“If you could avoid really hot conditions right now, that would be ideal,” Riganti said. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t look especially likely coming up in the next one to two weeks and, looking at the Climate Prediction Center’s six to 10 day temperature outlook, in most of the Southeast U.S. it looks like it has a fairly high confidence forecast for above normal temperatures right now.”
While Horry County hopes for rain and cooler temperatures, the National Weather Service recommends taking shorter showers, running dish and clothes washers less frequently, turning the water off while you brush your teeth or shave and watching for household leaks.